Transparent scalable video coding is a process for leveraging scalable video coding (SVC) to deliver content. In some situations, subscriber premises networks (e.g., wireless networks) may be unreliable. Conventional systems may use adaptive bit rate (ABR) technology to select an optimal encoding profile to be unicast to the client subscriber. This may create problems because the unicast of video streaming becomes inefficient as the number of streams scales upward. Furthermore, maintaining an encoding profile for each individual subscriber on a cable system may create a tremendous amount of overhead.
Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is an extension, Annex G, of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard. The SVC standard enables the encoding of a high-quality video bitstream that contains one or more subset bitstreams that can themselves be decoded with a complexity and reconstruction quality similar to that achieved using the existing H.264/MPEG-4 AVC design with the same quantity of data as in the subset bitstream. The subset bitstream is derived by dropping packets from the larger bitstream. A subset bitstream can represent a lower spatial or temporal resolution or a lower quality video signal (each separately or in combination) compared to the bitstream it is derived from. This allows a number of advantages such as temporal (frame rate) scalability, spatial (picture size) scalability, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)/quality/fidelity scalability.